Born with a rare heart condition, the death of three-year-old Hollie Garrity has rocked a family to its very core.

The Wallsend youngster, affectionately called “Hollie-bops” by her doting mam Kirsty Stubbs, 29, faced an uphill struggle from day one.

Kirsty found out Hollie’s heart had not developed in the right way during pregnancy and she was diagnosed with congenitally corrected transposition of the great arteries (CCTGA), a condition which means blood flow doesn’t happen as it should.

Hollie had already needed two operations, one when she just five-days-old, and last week the family got the call that she was going to be taken in for the big one they’d been waiting for.

Kirsty said: “After a few hours one of the medical staff came out to tell us that she was unstable and needed to be put on an ECMO machine because she had suffered heart failure and it needed to be kept going.

“The doctors told us there were risks but she was doing really well and we thought she’d only need to be on it for a couple of days because she was progressing every hour.

“On Thursday morning they came to do their normal checks and she wasn’t responding so they took her for a scan and discovered she’d suffered a serious bleed on the brain.

“There was nothing they could do.

“All I could do was cuddle in to her as they turned the machine off. I was with her.”

Kirsty paid tribute to her daughter: “She was so lovely and had so much life - you just wouldn’t know she had a heart condition if you met her.

Three-year-old Hollie Garrity from Wallsend, who died after a heart operation

Read More

While the family go through the agony of waiting for a post-mortem examination to be completed so they can begin to make funeral arrangements, Kirsty has already turned her mind to fundraising for the Children’s Heart Unit Fund (CHUF) at the Freeman Hospital.

Rather than be angry at the medical team who tried to save her but couldn’t, the heartbroken mother says she’s determined to give something back.